Situation: You have an organizational issue that would benefit from the use a team approach. Perhaps you need to update a work flow or improve organizational performance on a specific measure. However, during staff meetings you find that engagement is low, brainstorming lacks innovation, specific people dominate the meeting, and/or inter-departmental tensions impede collaboration.

Solution: Change your meeting structure! The following “Meeting Recipe” will dial up staff energy and lead to better performance improvement solutions!

What you’ll need:

Meeting time of 1 – 2 hours (epending on the depth of the problem or area you’re focusing on)

20 or more sticky notes and one pen per attendee

Dry erase board or flip charts

A volunteer to act as a high-energy facilitator & time keeper

Instructions:

Assign attendees into random or strategic pairs
Have them sit together in their pairs
I highly recommend being strategic — think about how pairs might increase collaboration among departments or individuals. You could pair up nurses with providers, administrators with front-line workers, etc.

Pass out sticky notes and pens to each attendee

State the challenge and the goal. Be clear and concise
For example, “We want to increase provider productivity by 20% in three months” or “We want to improve our patient check-in process to decrease patient and staff stress”

Give individuals 5 minutes to brainstorm on their own ideas for how this could be done
Rules:

One idea per sticky note

Each attendee must write down 4 – 10 ideas (yes – this is doable!)

At least one idea must be crazy, really fun, or pie-in-the-sky big (I often award candy to craziest ideas — this greatly energizes and revs up divergent thinking)

Have individuals now share ideas in their pairs
Give them 2-3 minutes per person to share their ideas, call “time” when it’s time to switch and have the other person share

Have pairs generate ideas
Give them 10 minutes to come up with 10 more ideas with their partners. Ideas can be completely new or building on each others. Again, one idea per sticky, at least 2 new crazy ideas.

Call everyone back together and round-robin to report back ideas
Rules:

Have pairs come up and post their sticky notes as they explain their idea onto the dry erase board or flip charts

Hold off on judgement – responses to ideas can only be praise or clarification questions

Limit reporting to 60 seconds per idea – make it a fun but strict cut-off to assure pairs report concisely and energy stays high in the room

If an idea was already presented, just have pairs say “ditto on ___ idea” rather than repeat it

Spread out the area where you’re posting the stickies, the more spread out, the better

Anyone at any point can “build” on an idea that is being presented and write down a new sticky note for it

Everyone vote for their 5 favorite ideas
Have everyone walk up at once and move around to review the ideas, then “vote” by marking the chosen sticky notes with a star. Give this just 5 minutes for this to assure people move fast and energy doesn’t drop – you’re almost there!

Now re-vote to narrow it down
Take down all but the top 10 voted-on ideas. Have everyone vote again but this time everyone gets one vote – this will lead you to your top 2-3 ideas to test out.

Decide on next steps
As a group decide what are the next steps to test out the chosen ideas, include time frames. Have pairs volunteer to take on the tasks. Pairs can them meet outside the meeting to plan how they’ll carry out their tasks. Have everyone report back in a meeting within a week.

After the meeting: Have someone transcribe all the ideas and note which were the highest rated. Refer back to these when you’re ready to try out a new test.

Real-life example:

A New York community health center faced this exact challenge — front-line staff were tasked with improving their productivity numbers but felt frustrated by leadership’s lack of support for their ideas. Months of meetings went by with little improvement in the situation and their numbers remained low. The front-line workers requested to have a potluck lunch meeting with leadership to re-energize the group and used this “recipe”. They paired up management team members with frontline staff members to break down hierarchy walls. After the meeting both leadership and front line workers reported loving the voting structure and noted the high energy among everyone- a significant change from prior meetings! They now plan on using “pairs” for all of their performance improvement work.

Paloma Medina is an MPA HPAM 2012 candidate with a specialization in organizational coaching and development. Her background is in homeless health care, community development and design. In her spare time Paloma can be found tailoring her clothing, re-organizing her craft supplies or coming up with new toppings for hot dogs.